Looking up

When I was four years old, I took an IQ test that changed my life.

I scored very high – as I remember it, my parents said that the scoring scale stopped before my result did – and as a result, because you could do this in Baltimore at the time, my parents decided to not send me to kindergarten, and instead send me to first grade. At the time I had no idea of the import of this, except that everybody I knew at the preschool I attended was going to kindergarten.

Ten days before my first day of first grade, I turned five. I was the youngest kid in the classroom - but some of them remembered me from preschool, and since we were all new at the school (it didn't have a kindergarten attached), I didn't have much trouble, as far as I remember.

349 days after that, my family moved twenty miles out of the city. A week after that, I turned six. Nine days after that, I entered second grade at a brand-new school.

All of those kids knew each other from kindergarten and first grade, and while I wasn't the only student who was new that year, I had the double whammy of being new and the youngest kid in second grade. Because of my August birthday, I was always going to be one of the youngest kids in my grade, but at this point I was the youngest by almost a year.†

For my entire childhood, I was play-acting being older than I was so that I could fit in better. (Spoiler: it didn't work.) Beyond that, because everyone I interacted with was older than I was, I had trouble drawing the distinction between older-than-me peers (my fellow students) and older-than-me adults. As a result, I started feeling like I was always the kid at the grown-ups' table, constantly seeking approval from them so that they'd accept me in the role they were forcing me into.

I still feel like the kid at the grown-ups' table, forty years after that IQ test. I feel like all my relationships are parasocial, because I'm just a child among proper adults. I put a huge amount of weight into the approval I get from others for the things I say and make. Being called out or contradicted makes me feel like a small child being told "hush, the adults are talking".

There's not a good end to this story. I don't know how to fix this. I just know that I want to, and I think the first part is acknowledging it.

† The one kid that year who was willing to unconditionally be my friend, I wound up abandoning when I got to middle school. I don't remember if we grew apart or if I went out of my way to lose touch with him, but regardless, it was an awful thing to do, even for a ten-year-old. Brian, if you're reading this, I apologize.